Internal growth, building a hydroponics farm and using cyanobacteria to improve the anaerobic digestion process

December Newsletter

Jan 2

Hi everyone! Wonderful to meet you/see you again! My name is Rachel. I am a 16 y/o activator at TKS working on leveraging biotech to improve yields and livelihoods for small holder farmers in rural Africa. A little about me: I want to actually help people around the world, reduce global suffering and have a social impact, while getting technical and learning whatever skills I need, building deep relationships and navigating this crazy roller coaster called life. I’m the cohost of the TechnoGypsie Podcast, and an ultra runner obsessed with pushing my personal limits and finding out what I’m truly capable of.

`Reflecting on 2022`

Happy 2023 everyone! I hope that you all had a restful and enjoyable Christmas with your loved ones. To close out 2022, I wrote a reflection article about the ups and downs, failures and growths of the past year which you can check out below!

`Real Growth Can Not Be Measured. It Is Internal, Not External.`

`2022 Year In Review`

Read Here

I wanted to share a few personal highlights of this year here with you all, my wonderful community of supportive mentors and friends:

I started finding the beauty of doing hard things. Humans like to live inside their comfort zone. This perfect little bubble of comfort that society tells us to wrap ourselves in. We’ve been taught to seek comfort at all costs — when you’re hungry, you eat; when you’re tired, you sleep; when you’re cold, you find warmth.
And there seems to be this idea that living the most comfortable life will bring you the most happiness.
But I just don’t buy into this idea of comfort equaling happiness.
This quote perfectly outlines how I’ve been thinking about comfort vs discomfort:
“If you don’t have any discomfort in your life, how do you know when you feel good?” — Lazarus Lake, creator of the Barkley Marathons (the hardest ultramarathon in the world)
This year I have been constantly reframing this mindset that society teaches us (comfort = happiness,) and instead have been pushing myself far out of my comfort zone to find my new hardest thing (which for me has been a marathon and ultramarathon, and my 6 month transgenic maize project which I worked on this year.)
I’m living my best life. This time last year was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. I was working more than I should have and started to fall into the mundane of life - get up, work, school, run, work, repeat. This year has been so much different. I feel alive and authentic. Constantly asking myself deep questions like: “What impact do I want to have on the world?” “What kind of person do I want to be?” “What do I value in life?”, has helped me sculp my ‘ideal life’ which I truly believe I’m living everyday. I work on meaningful projects that bring me fulfilment, spend time with people who bring me up and push me, and have shit ton of fun in the process. This is without a doubt my biggest accomplishment of this year.
Accomplishing things I never thought were possible. It is crazy that this year I ran a marathon and an ultra marathon. These were both things that I didn’t think were previously possible. Starting and growing a podcast and talking with leading experts across all STEM fields; this is another thing I didn’t think were previously possible. Meeting the most incredible, supportive and fun friends who push me to be the best version of myself, is yet another thing I didn’t think was possible. 2022 has really been a year of firsts - my first marathon, first ultra, first time developing real confidence, first true friends, first project I’m proud of. I’ve been learning over and over again this year that we are all capable of so much more than we can imagine, and the first step towards accomplishing your loftiest goals is believing you can.

2022 has been amazing and truly transformative. I can’t wait to see what 2023 brings!

`Anaerobic Digestion Project`

The TKS mentor focus showcase in mid December (where activate students networked with professionals in different industries and presented our work from the last 4 months) was a forcing function for me to make real progress on my anaerobic digestion project.

The top question I was focused on answering this month was what is the bottleneck of digestate processing that limits nutrient concentration? Or in other words, why is digestate, the by product of anaerobic digestion, so low in essential plant nutrients and how can we increase this nutrient content.

At the beginning of December I was naive and thought I could fully answer this question by the end of December. While now I know that this was unrealistic, I do have a hypothesis to answer my central research question. My hypothesis is that the acidity of the anaerobic digester causes the digestate to loose NPK which is used in biogas creation. So the idea I’ve been researching this month is using cyanobacteria to hold onto the NPK content in the digestate instead of releasing these molecules for biogas creation. I made a video outlining my hypothesis and proposal which you can watch below:

I also made a project memo where I break down my proposal and research, and a memo about the problem of low nutrient content in digestate.

`Hydroponics farm`

I am SO excited to announce that after several months of planning and buying supplies, I have finally started building the long awaited hydroponics system with my Dad. (Don’t know what hydroponics is? Check out my article!)

The system is 5 feet long by 3 feet wide, with three levels. Each level has four 5ft pipes with 8 holes in each. That adds up to 96 holes which will each hold one seed (aka 96 heads of lettuce)!

I have drilled all the holes, built a simple wooden structure to hold the pipes (with a lot of help from my Dad 😉), and installed the grow lights. Now we are waiting for a drill bit to come in so we can connect each pipe with 90° elbows.

So hopefully by mid January everything will be up and running and we can start growing the plants! Lots more exciting updates to come next month!

`Other cool things`

It has been such a fun and restful Christmas break which I loved spending with my family. We spent every day on a new outdoor adventure ~ downhill skiing, cross country skiing, skating, snowshoeing. I enjoyed several fun dinner parties and evenings sitting in front of the fire with my family and family friends. Grateful for this time to rest and recharge, I definitely feel rejuvenated going into 2023! (Also came to a realization of how important taking a break from work and projects are - while short term it seems like you are loosing time and being unproductive, in the long term you feel more excited and passionate to tackle your work with meaning and determination.)
The wonderful Ashna (activate student) hosted the most fun holiday activate trivia night! I teamed up with Apoorva, Noémie and Elly, and we had fun playing the holiday trivia and charades. It was lots of fun!

`What’s next?`

Working on the hydroponics system! The goal is to have it up and running by mid January and start growing the lettuce!
Ciara and I have an exciting new season of the TechnoGypsie Podcast with some very exciting guests which you will have to wait and see
I’ve created a 15 week training plan for the 2023 Ottawa Tartan Marathon which I will be running again! I have been enjoying backing off milage this winter and spending more time in the gym an outside with my family, but I am definitely excited to get back to intense training and jack up the running milage! My training will start mid February, and my goal for this year is a sub 3:15 marathon. I have learned a lot from training for a marathon last year, and I will be changing my training failures from last year to set me up for a 3:15 marathon.
Throughout the month of January I am doing the 31 day yoga retreat put on by Boho Beautiful. I haven’t been consistent with yoga in a long time, so I am excited to get into a regular routine of morning yoga practices!
I am SO excited for the activate PIE Challenge which will start at the beginning of January. PIE Challenge is a 4 week challenge to identify a problem inside an industry and develop a solution to it. The focus is on making things economic incentivized and understanding the business implication of the solution. In the past, activate has partnered with Shell and other billion dollar companies for this consulting challenge. The challenge partners will be announced in January so I will let you know in next month’s newsletter!

Some of my favorite memories of this year!

And that, my friends, is what I have been up to this month! Thank you for sticking with me till the end, see you all in January, and happy 2023! Wishing you all a healthy and happy New Year doing the things you love with the people you love.